


Hollow

by oneatatime



Category: Kamen Rider Build
Genre: M/M, Major Spoilers, Post Series, buns can get ptsd too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 00:10:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16051445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneatatime/pseuds/oneatatime
Summary: It was okay that Banjou didn't get it.





	Hollow

Sento nearly didn’t go back. He wasn’t needed in this new world. No one knew him. Everyone was safe, well, as safe as they usually were. In this world, he didn’t have a scraping, aching burden of responsibility because really it was all his fault. He nearly kept walking. 

But he found himself buying lunch, and trudging back to the two furnished rooms the two of them were renting temporarily. One bedroom, one kitchen / living room with a foldout couch, with access to a tiny shared bathroom down the hall. It sure wasn't great, but it was clean enough. Even if the floorboards squeaked nearly as much as the couch springs. 

The cardboard tray was warm on his forearm. Two cans of coffee made two bulges in his pockets. 

Banjou looked up from the dishes as Sento entered. He had a bright purple cloth tied around his hair for some ungodly reason that probably involved dusting and a general dislike of cobwebs. Spiders didn’t bother him at all, and in fact Sento had seen him waving goodbye to one that he’d carefully taken outside. Just cobwebs. Sento put the tray down on their rickety little wooden table and plucked the cans from his pockets. 

“Did you get the egg? I need it with an egg for protein.”

Sento raised his eyebrows, lifted the lid on Banjou’s stupid protein ramen with extra protein for proteinheads and used a chopstick to poke at the boiled egg floating in it. “I didn’t forget. I’m not as stupid as you look, Banjou.”

“Course you’re not!” There was an encouragingly protective look on Banjou’s face.

Sento snorted a laugh, feeling unexpectedly lighter. He ignored Banjou’s enquiring grumbles and sat down with his idiot to begin eating. 

* * *

Banjou kept doing it, somehow. 

They visited Nascita together, and every time Sento started to feel hollow, Owner was there with a shoulder clap and an encouraging word and Banjou was hastily looking away behind him. Or Banjou was in the midst of squawking as he ‘allowed’ Misora to demonstrate a grappling hold on him. Or Banjou asked Sawa if she knew anything about the Hindenburg Anxiety Principal and Sento got so furiously flustered that he wrote HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE on Banjou’s arm, in English and in permanent marker. 

The other man’s cheerful, dogged determination to keep existing made it easier for Sento. He knew Banjou didn’t get it, didn’t feel the same as he did. But that was… that was good, in a way. Banjou wasn’t happy about not being part of this world. He missed being able to relax with them all as before… and he didn’t let that stop him. He didn’t disappear. He kept showing up at Nascita, and he sought out Gentoku, and Sawa, and even Utsumi. The man was an idiot who needed Sento’s help to do things like fake an ID, find a job without any kind of work history, and put his shoes on the right feet in the mornings, but he was good at tying himself back into a web of life. 

* * *

So, it was okay that Banjou didn’t get it. It was okay to lay awake by himself in the small double bed, which they shared purely because they couldn’t afford to run the heater. It wasn’t the end of the world. Sento had lived through that, somehow, and he knew if he could survive that, he could survive everything. (He could. Apparently. Survive anything.)

It was okay, really, he told himself, as he stared at the wall. He curled up tighter around the emptiness in the centre of his chest, trying not to disturb Banjou. Banjou usually slept well enough, but he’d pulled some double shifts at the pizza place thanks to other workers having the flu, and he needed his sleep. Sento had worked extra time at the university lab, too, but that was because he felt like washing test tubes and mopping floors. It was something to do. No one was making him. 

There was a neon light blinking through the window from some antiquated video store down the street. Sento timed the blinks, trying to get a rhythm out of it, or at least derive the formula behind it. There was very little in any world that was truly random, after all. 

He didn’t realise he was shaking, until there was a sudden warm arm slung across his hip, and a sleep-fuzzed voice murmuring in his ear, “Don’t leave.” 

“I –“

Banjou tucked himself against Sento’s back, bringing his knees up and under to rest along the backs of Sento’s thighs. “Nabeshima, right? I don’t have a battery to show you with, but it’s the same. Right? They don’t remember us. We can make new memories with them.” 

Sento didn’t know whether to kiss him or hit him. It wasn’t the same. These people weren’t even their friends, they were quantum amalgams… but Banjou had shoved his own feelings to the side so he could help Nabeshima, and his daughter and wife, when they couldn’t get the answer they wanted. Banjou had understood well enough at that time.

Everything tipped up on one side and slid away crazily from Sento for a moment, as reality deranged itself around him. _All gone, none of that existed any more, all gone-!_

Stupid musclehead smelled like cheap jasmine shampoo and pizza cheese. Sento held onto the scent. Threaded his fingers through Banjou’s on his stomach. 

“It’s not the same,” he said quietly.

“Sure it is,” Banjou insisted, and then his voice roughened. Deepened. It was barely a whisper in Sento’s ear. “Please don’t - don’t disappear.“ 

Crap. 

Sento reflected for a moment on stupid muscleheads who needed him, and thereby kind of allowed him to need them, too, but it was too bare. Too much. “People don’t just disappear. You have no understanding of science,” came out of his mouth.

An instant reply of “Oi!”

The next three minutes (well, three minutes and about twenty-two seconds, judging by the light flickering through the window) of wrestling devolved into Sento in Banjou’s arms, Sento’s face pressed into the crook of Banjou’s neck. 

It wasn’t okay. But maybe Banjou did get it, kind of, in his own moronic way. 

Maybe he could sleep like this.

Maybe he could keep going, for another day.


End file.
